[T]the Army Corps of Engineers acknowledged today that the levees
it built in the city were an incomplete and inconsistent patchwork of
protection, containing flaws in design and construction, and not built
to handle a hurricane anywhere near the size of Katrina.

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"The hurricane protection
system in New Orleans and southeast Louisiana was a system in name
only," said the draft of the nine-volume report.

The region's
network of levees, floodwalls, pumps and gates lacked any built-in
resilience that would have allowed the system to remain standing and
provide protection even if water flowed over the tops of levees and
floodwalls, the report's investigators found. Flaws in the levee design
that allowed breaches in the city's drainage canals were not foreseen,
and those floodwalls failed even though the storm waters did not rise
above the level that the walls were designed to hold.

But the
system was also overwhelmed in significant ways by Hurricane Katrina,
and some degree of flooding would have happened even if the floodwalls
had not been topped by the surging waters, the report stated.

"Regardless of breaching or no breaching, there would have been massive
flooding and losses" from Katrina, said Dr. Ed Link, the director of
the study and an engineering professor at the University of Maryland,
in an interview. "The losses were increased because of the breaching
that occurred," he said.